★ ★ ★ ★ ½
Third time’s the charm for director Ridley Scott as The Martian takes him back into the stratosphere.
After messing up McCarthy with The
Counsellor and making a mockery of Moses in Exodus, Scott’s latest adaptation (taken from the pages of Andy
Weir’s hit novel) is a much-welcomed return to form.
Botanist Mark Watney (Matt Damon) sees red when his fellow
astronauts are forced to abandon him on the surface of Mars. A freak storm jeopardises
the mission and Watney is left alone to ‘science the shit’ out of his
surroundings to survive until the next spacecraft arrives…in four years’ time.
Damon finally stops reminding me of a decade-old Team America gag and glows in the
central role. Scott makes the best of massively promising source material by
giving us a Mark Watney who is as witty, indefatigable and just plain fun to
hang around with as we’d expect. Somehow this fusion of Gravity’s Ryan Stone and Mythbuster’s
Adam Savage commands our full attention while still allowing the allure of
beautiful landscapes and a shoe-tapping disco soundtrack to slip through.
When you’re armed with a supporting cast including no less
than Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jessica Chastain, Sean Bean, Benedict Wong and Kristen
Wiig, there’s not a lot that can harm you. Never does the film feel crowded or
directionless, and everyone has just enough development to throw them clear of
thumbnail sketches. It would be incredibly easy to make Jeff Daniel’s disapproving
NASA executive a moustache-twirling villain, but the film is far above
mistreating it’s characters in that way. Everyone’s clearly having the time of
their life, and this is no more apparent than a sequence featuring David Bowie’s
Starman playing over the cinematic
equivalent of a high-five.
The issue was always going to be how you make the journey of
Watney and his would-be saviours entertaining once the initial hurdles of life
on Mars have been conquered. One would imagine there’s not an awful lot to top
a single man eking out a life on the fringe of existence, but whether it’s
growing food on a dead planet, trying to get a single word to cross 140 million
miles of void or facing the heart-stopping finale, the excitement (and the
laughter) in this orange odyssey is green across the board.
The Martian bears
the trappings of a young director in his creative prime. How much of this
youthful energy emits purely from Weir’s novel or Goddard’s script is
debatable, but for now I’m quite happy to put it down to the spirit of
collaboration that permeates the whole piece. This is a joyous adventure
against the odds, manned by a crew that fails to put a foot wrong.
